Site owners, submit your site for inclusion in our fundraising ideas directory.

Benefits of going green.

(Cleveland, Ohio)

I work for a school district in Cleveland, Ohio and like most schools, we hit a budget crunch and had to cut funding to extra curricular activities. This upset everyone and the teachers pooled together to try and find a way that we could conjure up more funds for the after school activities that would pay for uniforms and dues.

Since many of the teachers had already been teaching the benefits of going green in our classes, we decided that a recycling drive would be the best idea to both teach and help the children. This showed that not only were they doing something to help the environment, but they were doing something to help themselves as well.

We decided that we would collect aluminum cans, plastic bottles, ink cartridges
, laser printing cartridges, old cell phones and glass jars as recycling items.

The teachers pooled together donations from various companies to host a picnic for those children who brought in the most recycling items.

They would have a chart and for every five recycling items, were given a gold star on their chart. If the child reached 20 gold stars at the end of the drive, they would be allowed to miss half a day of school to attend the recycling picnic with games, prizes, and a pizza and movie party outdoors at a local park.

We would chart not only the progress but the amount of money that the recycling brought in and how much was needed to reinstate the extra curricular activities.

The students would get excited to see how close we were coming to our goals and the closer we got, the more the children seemed to recycle.

In all, we raised FAR above what we needed and ended up donating the extra monies to a local charity.